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Dec 30, 2014 Web Exclusive By John Everhart

Under the Radar’s writers are picking a few of 2014’s records they personally feel were overlooked, perhaps albums that didn’t land on our Top 140 Albums of 2014 list, nor on many other best of the year lists. Here John Everhart writes about The Hidden Cameras’ AGE.

Hidden Cameras frontman Joel Gibb has over the course of his career evoked the rarified likes of, to suggest modern antecedents, Antony Hegarty, Stuart Murdoch, and Stephin Merritt in the sheer breadth of emotions he conveys. He vividly captures the vulnerability at the core of the human condition, rendering his oft-focused upon brazenly homoerotic lyrics just another hue in his captivating songwriting palette. That’s not to say they aren’t brilliant, and they’re keenly attuned to the beauty and brutality so attendant to living in the ‘10s on AGE, his finest work to date, and in our era of digital inundation, when it’s almost impossible to give music away, also his most overlooked, as since its release in early ‘14, it’s been greeted with nary a shrug from the public at large.

Gibb told me in an email circa ‘08, rather cryptically, “it’s getting darker and darker,” and AGE is downright sepulchral at times-see the mournful dirge of “Gay Goth Scene,” with Gibb’s Canadian kindred spirit Mary Margaret O’Hara lending braying yet gorgeous caterwaul backing vocal, or the blunt diatribe “Doom,” the closest thing on AGE to a “single,” with an anthemic surge which sublimates rage at Wall Street’s unrepentant svengalis into a joyfully cathartic call to arms. It’s this dichotomy that renders AGE so fascinating-peeling back the dense layers of this album isn’t always a pleasant experience, but it’s damn rewarding, hearing Gibb documenting our insane times with a fascination for the grey areas, morbidly allergic to facile black and white portraitures.

The album’s dedicated to transsexual whistleblower Chelsea Manning, which makes perfect sense in he grand scheme of Gibb’s milieu-Manning’s a character the late Lou Reed would’ve gravitated towards holding up for tender examination in song, something akin to the protagonist of “Candy Says,” and Gibb flirts with this level of genius throughout AGE.

While it rates as one of the unheralded masterpieces of ‘14, one of Reed’s ardent acolytes, R.E.M.‘s Michael Stipe, certainly recognizes AGE‘s, and Gibb’s, sublime qualities. When asked for a quote on the album via email, Stipe said, “Joel has a pure ear for melody and an astonishing voice and range. He’s a great songwriter. I count him as a very close friend.”

Gibb has another album in the bag, something of a countrified yin to AGE‘s orchestral, crepuscular F-minor political manifesto yang. Early word makes it sound equally audacious at a conceptual level, but perhaps a bit easier to digest without a massive investment of attentive listens. This seems as though it may be a double-edged sword, but with Gibb’s near peerless track record over the course of five terrific albums, it’s difficult to imagine that it won’t be at very least another artistic triumph, traversing uncharted stylistic ground for a man light years removed from the self-anointed “gay church folk music” he pioneered in 2003 with The Smell of Our Own.

Gibb hasn’t replicated the commercial success of that breakthrough, but he’s never attempted to. He’s operated on his own idiosyncratic terms when he could easily churn out another sing-songy “Ban Marriage,” instead following the paths of the likes of Scott Walker, Kate Bush, Arthur Russell, Kevin Ayers, and the aforementioned O’Hara. The public at large may not appreciate Gibb now, but someday he’ll get his due. Art this challenging, which places songcraft at the vanguard, willfully unfazed by the demands of commerce, almost inevitably finds a passionate niche audience, and occasionally, as with Gibb’s friend Stipe’s band, a broad one. For Gibb’s sake, here’s hoping it’s the latter, and that appreciation commands a large space for AGE, the darkest, hardest to crack spot on his discography that also, rather paradoxically, is also its pinnacle. (thehiddencameras.com)